Natures: Landscapes of Human Intention
We derive meanings from nature. How much of these meanings are in and of themselves — what we might call a bare nature; or self-referential to our species defining production of totems, divine revelations, and modern systems of meaning? Does our search for beauty and meaning in nature solely reveal an inward gaze — as landscapes of human intention? Or does nature speak to us — and if so, what are the languages? And what reflected natures do we see in service of this search? And how do these questions shape the boundaries for what we consider to be the genre of landscape photography?
Snow Never Falls Here, Nayeem Siddiquee (2020)
Rotterdam Maasvlakte, Bart van Damme (2020)
Offerle, Kansas, Don Hudson (2011)
Untitled, Julie Paterson (2020)
Nuclear Island, Michael Kowalczyk (2020)
From the Edge, Ulladulla, Julia Coddington & Gerry Orkin (2020)
Monument Valley, Arizona, Simon Kossoff (2015)
Gipsy Hood, Cloud House, Anne-Sophie Landou (2019)
Sand 69, Lars Nordström (2020)
Industry Vantage Point, Port Kembla, NSW, Chris Round (2014)
Dragon City Mall Fountain, Wendy Morgan (2019)
Untitled, Morocco, Sasha Kurmaz (2016)
Dissolving Act, Markus Lehr (2018)
Mojave Desert, California, Barstow, Ed Peters (2019)
Las Vegas, Casino Center Blvd, Brad McMurray (2012)
California Road Trip, Jordi Huisman (2019)
Three Chairs, Micah McCoy (2021)
Stalled Development, Mahomet, Illinois, Brian O’Neill (2020)
Tempesta, Monica Smaniotto (2020)
Like Time Passing By, Anna Longworth (2021)
Untitled, Benedetta Falugi (2020)
Untitled, High Line, NYC, Phillip Kalantzis-Cope (2014) (cover)
Death of Aratsch, Catherine Lemblé (2019)
Contributors
Cody Cobb (b. 1984 in Shreveport, Louisiana) is a photographer currently based in Las Vegas, Nevada. His photographs aim to capture brief moments of stillness from the chaos of nature. For weeks at a time, Cobb wanders the American West alone in order to fully immerse himself in the seemingly untouched wilderness. This isolation allows for more sensitive observations of both the external landscape as well as the internal experience of solitude. Through subtle arrangements of light and geometry, the illusion of structure appears as a mystical visage. These portraits of the Earth's surface are an attempt to capture an entanglement of the observer and the observed.
Jordi Huisman is a commercial, documentary, and architectural photographer based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He studied mechanical engineering before attending The Royal Academy of Art (KABK) in The Hague to study photography. Huisman combines editorial and commercial work with documentary photography, focusing on the urban environment we live in and on the disparate ways we occupy, shape, and modify it – not only in his native Netherlands but anywhere in the world.
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Sasha Kurmaz (b. 1986 in Kyiv, Ukraine) Currently lives and works in Kyiv, Ukraine. Sasha is an interdisciplinary artist with a graffiti background. In his artistic practice, he studies various models of interaction with public space, social groups, and communities as well as examines the tension between the citizen and the State. The focus of his work is urban space, society, and the relationship between the artist and the viewer. He uses different media to work with these issues, such as photography, video, public intervention, and performative situations.
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Catherine Lemblé (b. 1990) is a Belgian film photographer based in Brussels. She received her master’s in photography from Luca School of Arts Brussels. Her work is framed by the ever-changing relationship between man and the natural world. Her first book Cabin Fever was self-published in 2019.
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Wendy Morgan is an interdisciplinary artist living in Toronto, Canada
Gerry Orkin started making photographs again only a few years ago but his involvement in photography goes back decades. He studied documentary photography in the UK and his work made in Indigenous communities in the 1980s is held in major Australian collections and has appeared in exhibitions, monographs, and books. In the mid-1980s he co-founded Photo Access, Australia's first community photographic center.
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Chris Round is a landscape photographer based in Sydney, Australia. From documenting landscapes featuring direct human interventions to exploring ideas of place, Chris’s work primarily investigates our ever-changing relationship with the 21st Century environment. Within these themes, he looks for scenes that visually activate their surroundings in strangely compelling ways, fortuitously photogenic environments that he carefully documents rather than photographically exaggerates.
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Monica Smaniotto (b. 1986) was born in a mountain village in the North of Italy. She studied art and landscape architecture. During her teenage travels, she began to experiment with photography, particularly with 35mm film. Monica is constantly observing the world around her, using photography as a visual diary and research practice. She is inspired by our connection to nature, music, myths, by the oneiric, and by the unknown.
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Bart van Damme (b. 1963) studied painting at Vrije Academie in The Hague, and Minerva Academy in Groningen, before moving to photography. His work can be seen as a series of research-based projects, asking questions about spatial matters that connect with social, industrial, infrastructural, and environmental issues. He explores landscapes in transformation, their ideological backgrounds, and their effects on their inhabitants. Looking for underlying interconnectivity and coherence, van Damme tries to break the barriers between the sensational world and the non-material abstract idea, where structure takes precedence of the narrative.
Julia Coddington is an internationally recognized street photographer based in Austinmer, New South Wales. She is co-founder of the Australian-based Unexposed Collective, for women, nonbinary and intersex street photographers and an administrator of @womeninstreet, a growing international community of women street photographers. Julia is also a member of the Little Box Collective.
Benedetta Falugi is an independent photographer based in Tuscany, Italy. Initially approaching photography in a rather casual way, Benedetta realized her passion and continued to study photography through various workshops and as an autodidact. Corresponding with her independent studies, Benedetta began personal projects attempting to research "places of the heart" and "people living there". Her work has been published in several online and printed magazines and shown in various exhibitions in Italy and abroad. She has worked for the following clients: Visa (New York), Nokia (United Kingdom), fashion brands Mal Famile and Noodle Park (Italy); and is represented by Art + Commerce Agency New York- Photo Vogue Collection.
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Simon Kossoff is a British photographer living in the United States. His work takes us on a psycho-geographical road trip, with each image a point in a personal collection of coordinates. Kossoff connects the search for personal orientation between the dreams or ideals of a place and the experience of reality in it. Half-truth and half-fiction, these photographs are tangled in personal symbolism. And while his images plot an intimate journey, they help us explain ourselves -- our journeys as we drift from dreaming, exploring, and living the places we exist in.
Anne-Sophie Landou (b. 1989) is a self-taught French creative based in Marseille, with a degree in economic law and intellectual property. Landou has an urge to create a language with words, pencils, or cameras. She considers herself a "Visual Detective." Her work is raw and intuitive, not interested in the apparatus; for her, only the image matters. Landou's work has been published in the following venues: ARTPIL, PhotoVogue, L'Oeil de la Photographie, PHmuseum, Fisheye Magazine, Velvet Eyes, PLATEFORM magazine, Full Frontal Flash Collective, Frizzfrizzi, SoundVision Magazine, Rûm-Magazine.
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Micah McCoy is a photographer and poet based in Northwest Arkansas. He received his MFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago (2022) and has been featured in exhibitions at Belong Gallery Chicago, IL, Millepiani Exhibition Space Rome, Italy, Southeast Center for Photography Greenville, SC and others. Micah’s work explores issues of religiosity, anxiety, and social detachment.
Lars Nordström (b. 1969) is a photographer from Sweden. He studied liberal arts and journalism and is self-taught as a photographer. His work focuses on images of urban spaces, landscapes, objects, and interiors. His latest project, Sand (2020 - 21), is about sandscapes in industrial locations and quarries. The images are characterized by their formal qualities, and the boundaries between nature and manmade landscapes as they dissolve, and in the end become irrelevant.
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Julie Paterson (b. 1970) studied fine arts degree at The Victorian College of Arts in 2003. She exhibited in group and in-situ collaborative exhibitions in Melbourne during the 1990s and early 2000s. She began photography in 2010. Her photographic images predominately concentrate on nearby landscapes where she lives in Victoria Australia often revisiting the same places across time and seasons. She also enjoys using the camera experimentally, relinquishing control and allowing chance to enter the frame. She prefers not to be pinned down by aesthetics seeking exploration within the elements and in the endless potential of the visual.
Ed Peters is a photographer based in the United States. His work frequently focuses on the relationship of people to their surrounding environments.
Don Hudson (b. 1950 in Detroit, Michigan) has lived in the Detroit area his entire life. In 1972 he decided to act on his love of photography and enrolled in art school. During his two years there he studied the language, both the history and the history-in-making, honed his technical skills, and most importantly, began an association with like-minded souls playing the game of photography. For 50 years, through peaks and valleys of activity, his playing of the game has been about his personal relationship with how the camera describes the appearance of truth in a photograph. You will have to look at the photographs for further explanation. He considers himself a thoughtful, and proudly amateur photographer. A book of his photographs from the last century “From The Archives”, was published in France in 2012, and a recent Peanut Portfolio (limited edition book and print) was produced in 2019.
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Michael Kowalczyk is a Germany-based, award-winning photographer with a special interest in making photographs in public to document the spirit of the times. Michael´s professional working background is in education and training. He is the founder of the Streetphototip project, a place with tips, events, and inspirations for the street photography community.
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Markus Lehr (b. 1959) is a fine art photographer and curator based in Berlin, Germany. He told us: “Despite the fact that there are rarely any people visible in my images, I think they are all about us. There was a time in my life when I worked in a theatre. And that moment when everybody left and the stage was quiet and empty, that was always the most inspiring one for me. The show was over, and but light was still directed on the stage, although nobody was watching it anymore. What I am looking for in my work is just like that."
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Brad McMurray is a Vancouver, Canada based photographer. His work focuses on the idiosyncratic structures and designs of the urban and peri-urban environment. He explores the complexities of the built environment and our navigation within it. Mr. McMurray has exhibited widely and his photographs are held in the permanent collections of public art galleries, as well as many private collections.
Brian O’Neill is a sociologist and photographer based in Illinois, for the moment. His work explores the relations of society to nature, using a variety of documentary and analytical techniques. Much of his photographic and sociological output to date has investigated the practices and meanings of "industry" to local communities and environments. His forthcoming photographic project interrogates the industrialization and development of coastal California, where he spent 1 year working.
Anna Longworth is a photographer from and currently based in Central Illinois, Anna is in the constant pursuit of documenting what it means to be alive. The good, the bad, and everything in between. She believes the best images are found by simply bearing witness to moments happening as they are.
Nayeem Siddiquee (b. 1995) born in Chittagong, Bangladesh, is known to everyone as "Nayeem Jabaz". He started street photography (as a serious hobby) in 2016. And, in a short time, he has become part of the 'New Wave' of Bangladesh Street Photographers. He is the editor of Street Photography Bangladesh, an important outlet for the Bangladesh street photography community. He is also the founder of the Instagram account Animal in Street. Nayeem's work is full of his feelings, emotions, and imaginations.